“Still do on occasion.”
“Good, good. Well, I can see that you’re setting up something.” He nodded toward the flight deck where Trisha’s and her helicopters were tied down. “So, what’s the plan?”
“Please don’t take this wrong, sir. But the plan on your end is very simple. We will be departing”—she checked her watch—“in thirty-four minutes. If all goes well, we will be returning before dawn on the following night.”
He waited for her to continue.
When she didn’t, Claudia could see the frustration building up in him.
“Excuse me. You’re implying that I drove my ship and crew over four thousand miles to just sit here?”
“I’m afraid so, sir.” Before he could complain further, she added, “Should you need to contact me, I anticipate being available through Captain Kara Moretti. You’ll find her in the coffin, the Gray Eagle’s command-and-control container, stored at the aft end of the hangar deck. I’m sorry, sir. I have to go now. I appreciate the coffee.”
He looked at her balefully for several seconds as she stood, then laughed for a moment.
“Well, if that doesn’t put me in my place for sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong.” He rose and held out his hand to shake hers. “I wish you the very best of luck, Captain. If you should need anything of me, simply have Captain Moretti ask.” His handshake was firm and sincere.
In that moment she knew. She finally understood why Boyd Ramis would always be a second-rate commander. Taking that last bit of responsibility for the lives of your team wholly on your shoulders was a weight he couldn’t bear, so he spread it around, laying what he could on the shoulders of those around him.
Well, she didn’t have a choice. Tonight, she and three team members would live or die based on a plan she had developed and taken full ownership of. She could at least absolve the LCDR of this mission if it went wrong.
She returned the handshake. “If I have need of you, Commander Ramis, I fear I will be beyond helping.”
“Nonetheless, the offer stands.” And in one of those things Boyd Ramis somehow did so well and that won him the support of those he could depend upon, he made it sound as if it was for her alone that he’d do this.
Dropping down several stories to the hangar deck, she knocked on the coffin and smiled up at the tiny security camera perched over the door. Kara let her in and started briefing her the moment the seal was set.
“I’ve been aloft for three hours as we planned. I’m presently on station at thirty thousand feet. Let me show you.” Kara led her over to the command-and-control station.
The coffin was the size of a short shipping container. The racks at the front could contain a disassembled Gray Eagle and its parts kit. Those had been left at Incirlik with the small launch team who didn’t need to know anything about the mission. At the far end of the console were a pair of chairs, each of which looked like a cross between a Barcalounger and the captain’s chair on the starship Enterprise. The chairs were on pivots in front of side-by-side curved consoles that made a Black Hawk look seriously under-equipped.
Santiago, Kara’s copilot, a rather intense and silent young sergeant, sat in one chair. Kara leaned on the back of the other.
Large screens across the top gave several views as seen by the Gray Eagle. Below that were readouts from the nonvisual gear: radio frequency intercepts, quiescent screens that could fill in moments with Hellfire targeting data, and several that Claudia didn’t recognize at all. Below that was a full set of flight instruments giving the status of the bird and then a joystick control with just as many shortcut buttons as she had on the head of her helicopter’s cyclic. They even had mixture and throttle controls just like any plane would. In the narrow space between the two consoles was a whole rack of radios.
“We found your subs.” She pointed at the top right screen. Exactly as reported, two long, thin shapes sat low in the water alongside a pier in the south bay at Bibi-Heybat. “I’ve already given confirmation to Colonel Gibson. Tosca done good.”
“Good. Who’s Tosca?”
“Opera heroine. Not the smartest of ladies, but when the bad guy betrays her trust and kills her lover, she executes the villain herself.”
“You sure you’re over this singer Carlo?” It didn’t sound much like it to Claudia if Kara was naming her equipment after operatic heroines.
“Oh sure, totally done with him. But he does sing beautifully.”
She gave a small sigh that totally confused Claudia. She’d have bet it was a sad sigh. So she dropped the subject.
“Santiago, bring up the view of Karachala.” Kara moved to lean against the back of her assistant’s chair; the casual lean clearly one of Kara Moretti’s natural states that made her look even more elegant. On Trisha it would rapidly decay into a sloppy slouch. On Claudia such a move would look clumsy, one of the reasons she’d trained herself to sit and stand straight and tall.
In moments, a view of dusty Karachala airport at Salyan, Azerbaijan, showed up on one of the main screens. Santiago did something and a red circle showed up at the northwest corner of the runway. “There’s your first target.”
Claudia felt the relief coursing through her. Their first two steps were in place. They were two of the only three fixed assets in the whole mission. Everything else they’d have to make up as they went. After Claudia offered a final thanks, Kara let her out of the coffin and resealed it with a sharp clack of locks.
Claudia breezed through the chow line. Most of the SOAR fliers were still on leave, so no one was around to ask questions there. The Rangers who’d stayed aboard for the transit showed a halfhearted interest in her being suited up for flight.
“Training flight. We’re just warming up for some training work with the Turks next week.” A set of exercises that the White House Chief of Staff was rapidly arranging at this very moment as a cover.
Groans greeted her explanation. These guys were used to action, and after the high-mission tempo of Somali, steaming for a week was making them kind of cranky.
A handful of energy bars, a few bottles of water, and a sausage-and-egg English muffin sandwich, which she began eating as she walked, were all in keeping with her cover story.
On deck with ten minutes to go until flight, Trisha and the boys were already prepped.
“Hi. Did you get some of that sleep you needed?” Michael’s smile was soft and protective.
Right, now she recalled him guiding her to bed last night. She must have really been out of it. Had she even hugged him this time? Not that she recalled. She could only smile and nod; her voice somehow eluded her.
Michael always looked good to her. But now he looked really amazing—her own personal guardian angel. One who looked like no other. Nighttime desert camo, pouches bulging with ammunition. His chest expanded by the swim gear and bulletproof vest under the shirt. No bulky survival vest like Trisha’s and her SARVSO survival gear with pockets filled with food, compass, maps, med-kit, and a dozen other essentials if they were to crash.
A D-boy stayed lean and mean. Michael’s vest had five pockets across the front, each stuffed with four rifle magazines. His handgun wasn’t at his hip, rather it too was across his front below the magazine pockets. Michael had claimed that it typically saved a half second or more on the draw. He had a silenced HK416 machine gun draped across his chest and a silenced PSG1 sniper rifle hanging over his shoulder. His MICH Kevlar helmet had a set of four-tube panoramic night-vision goggles, the same that were worn by the team that took down bin Laden’s compound.
He appeared impossibly strong and powerful, exactly how she’d want her guardian angel to look. It made her feel suddenly shy before him, not one of her natural states. She turned away to inspect her own gear.
“I already preflighted your bird,” Trisha commented with a smile.
“Don’t take this wrong, but—even though
I now know who the hell you are, Chief Warrant—I don’t fly a bird I didn’t preflight.”
“Be my guest.” Trisha completed the ritual.
How far they’d come since that first flight. Claudia knew now that she could trust Trisha in any situation, no matter how ugly. And while she might fly like a maniac, she flew like an immensely skilled one. It took Claudia only minutes to check out her Maven. She really was clean. She patted the Little Bird’s nose and asked the wise women to lead them all home safe and sound and Catwoman’s sidekick to boot some butt.
Five minutes later, exactly at sunset, they were ready to head out: Bill with Trisha and Michael beside Claudia. Kara and Santiago in the coffin. That was her action team. She wondered if it was good luck or bad that the mission didn’t have a name. Maybe all black-in-black operations remained nameless as a part of being invisible. Or maybe they all happened so fast that no one had time to think of one—she certainly hadn’t.
Ramis had apparently gone up to primary fly control because his voice answered when she radioed PriFly for departure clearance.
“Roger. Cleared for exercise, Omega Four. Good hunting, Captain.”
As with any clearance for flight, the proper response was simply to take off and depart from the ship’s flight pattern. So Claudia did just that, pulling up the collective and nosing the cyclic forward. Trisha came off the deck the same instant she did.
“Omega Four?” Michael asked over the intercom. Bulked up with all his gear, he barely fit beside her. His pack was crammed in beside the big ammo cans that filled the helicopter’s backseat.
“Got me. Something Ramis cooked up. Omega is ‘the ending’ and there are four of us. At least that’s all I can think of. I didn’t brief him on the mission other than to say we’d be gone for a few days, but he’s not stupid. He knows that we’re why he moved his ship.”
As she slid down to wave height and set course for an uninhabited strip of the Georgia coast, Claudia decided that wasn’t a bad name for this flight. She just hoped it was a lucky one.
“Let’s hope it is not the ending of us.” Michael echoed her own silent thought as he so often did.
A glance over at him in the last of the light didn’t reveal whether or not he was joking. She didn’t think he told jokes, or if he did, they were too subtle for her to notice.
They were compatible in that way too. Trisha always had something to say and some tone to say it in: wry, amused, teasing, flirty… All that did was make Claudia tired. She’d take Michael’s forthrightness any day.
“How did Bill and Trisha meet?”
“She rescued him from a Somali pirate attack, and he wasn’t very happy about it.”
He must have noticed the sideways turn of her head despite the darkening cabin.
“Honestly. He was undercover on Somali soil as a mercenary to track the hostages. She refused to leave without him. Turned out that without question, she saved his life.”
“So, then smack, it was happy ever after?”
“Took them a bit to get over being angry at each other. Then no one ever thought Trisha would settle down, her probably least of all. It took a bit, but yeah, it was pretty fast.”
“Like us. We’re happening so fast that you’re still making my head spin, Colonel Gibson.”
They crossed over the beach. They were now unwelcome and illegal invaders of the country of Georgia. If they were caught, an international incident was the least of what would happen and “we were just passing through” wouldn’t be an acceptable excuse, not without special permission and not in heavily armed helicopters packed with exotic gear.
“Feet dry.”
* * *
Michael was glad that the cabin was dark enough that she couldn’t see him flinch. He literally was in the dark. His PNVGs were turned off to conserve their batteries, and he wore the wrong type of helmet to plug into the Little Bird’s ADAS camera gear. All he could see were the faint lights of the console, tuned to work with her night-vision gear, not his unenhanced eyes.
Claudia was racing them along a bare ten feet over the Georgian soil. In moments they were flying the ridges and valleys of the mountains that lined the Black Sea. Helicopters would be rare at night here, but not impossible. The Georgian Air Force owned approximately a hundred helicopters, though none would sound like a stealth-silenced Little Bird. Thankfully, the average person on the ground wouldn’t know that their unique sound signature indicated a foreign power aloft. This first leg of the mission was considered low risk.
With no visual reference points, Michael had to clench his jaw against the nausea. Claudia was jerking and twisting the craft to retain her flying altitude.
Cut the bullshit, Gibson. It wasn’t the flight that was making him feel sick to the pit of his stomach.
It was Claudia, and there was no point fooling himself. She really thought they had a future. And why wouldn’t she? He hadn’t said anything to disabuse her of the notion. They’d even talked about children, for crying out loud!
She nosed over a ridge and plunged down the far side, leaving his stomach still gaining altitude somewhere behind him.
He had to face it. He didn’t dare let her get any closer, because he knew he was losing his survival edge, slowing down. Someday soon, maybe tonight, at some critical instant, he’d no longer be the fastest one. A kid with a tenth his experience but possessed of a nervous system wired up on speed-texting and full-immersion video games would be that hundredth of a second faster, and it would all be over for him.
There was no way that he could do that to Claudia. And yet she deserved to be told. Soon. He knew enough about soldiers to know that now was even a worse time to come clean than while she’d been planning the mission. She needed to be out on the edge if they were going to succeed.
Unlike Trisha who thought “edge” was a place you were supposed to live every minute of your day, even unlike a D-boy who hunted for “edge” as surely as he hunted the Taliban, Claudia used “edge” as a tool. Like a knife sharpened and honed, she had built up layers of skills and planning until she was so ready that “edge” would emerge at the moment it was needed.
If he told her they were over, he’d blunt that edge past recovery, at least for this mission, hopefully not for longer. If they were going to survive this, it wasn’t because of his and Bill’s skills any more than it would be Trisha or Claudia’s flying. If they survived, it would be the perfect wielding of Claudia’s intense mental edge.
“How fast we moved makes my head spin too,” he told her. The bitterness of the half-truth was very hard to swallow.
* * *
Claudia focused on the flying. Her helicopter’s systems included a highly accurate terrain map of the entire region that was synchronized and superimposed with what she was seeing. The stored map showed as a line-figure glimmer behind the night-vision infrared reality. There were problems with it though. Unlike Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the map had holes. There were gaps where no analyst had reviewed and resolved conflicting readings. It was also several years since the file had been updated for Georgia and Azerbaijan as they were “friendly” nations. New buildings, bridges, power lines, and the like weren’t necessarily on the map.
So, she flew more by instinct, following the terrain she could see rather than anticipating her route from a map she didn’t dare trust.
It was a good analogy. She and Michael had moved into a new phase of their relationship. He’d begun as a lover but had shifted over to the role of protector as if they were a committed couple. It had occurred so smoothly and seamlessly that she hadn’t even noticed the transition point.
She’d always been her own protector, and to have someone else in that role was surprising. It would take some thinking about. She’d been a loner for thirty years, the only child of a pretty checked-out family, her safety and her education mostly in her own hands. Fitting in had been
just another skill, one learned at Annapolis that had transferred to the Marine Corps as easily as to SOAR.
Yes, she wanted to be with Michael so badly her body ached with it even now. But they needed to work out a few things, just so that she was clear about them.
Now was not the time. Too much of her concentration was needed to avoid flying them into the side of a barn, but after the mission maybe they could finish their interrupted leave. Then they would have a talk. And if it came out the way she expected—the way she hoped—it was going to move them to a whole new level.
She threaded through the dense population centers around Tbilisi without having to cross into Armenian airspace, then began descending into the flatter, more arid lands of Western Azerbaijan. At least Georgia was behind them. Azerbaijan was U.S. friendly and could probably be talked out of executing the task force if they came down on Azeri soil.
The main risk now was oil-well derricks. They grew thicker here than the desert grass. There were more than two thousand working wells within the Baku greater metropolitan area alone, and that wasn’t counting the offshore rigs.
She couldn’t climb. Anything over fifty feet and her detection avoidance system would start stuttering with intermittent traffic radar warnings. Near Baku, between the international airport and the military bases, she’d have to stay under twenty feet.
But the oil derricks were everywhere. She’d never seen anything like it.
She felt like she was flying a slalom course worthy of the Sochi Olympics after all.
Chapter 24
Michael noted that they weren’t quite on fumes, but Claudia was well into the extended-range gas tank by the time they slid into Karachala Airport fifty miles southwest of Baku. Kara Moretti confirmed no flights inbound or outbound from the small airstrip. It had no commercial flights at all, and only a few private craft were parked there. The airport was a Soviet holdover used by few and nearly forgotten.
But not totally, which Michael had been counting on since his buddy at the SAS had happened to mention it as a quiet, out-of-the-way spot he knew if someone—oh, he had no idea who—might just want to land a plane there.
Bring On the Dusk Page 26
